Transplant

Transplant

Transplant, a long-term collaborative project with photographer Tim Wainwright explores territory on the borders of art and anthropology, extending the sensory turn in ethnography in the direction of sound and investigating new relationships between sound and still image. Continuing Wynne’s pursuit of socially engaged sound arts practice and multi-channel installation, it began with a year-long residency at Harefield Hospital, a world-leading centre for heart and lung transplantation.

The artists recorded and photographed patients, the devices they were attached to or had implanted, and the hospital environment, researching and developing ideas leading to multiple outcomes.

In various ways, heart and lung transplants blur the easy distinctions between life and death, between being alive and not. The transplant unit at Harefield is a place where all these issues cross, where dying and living has a different and more elastic meaning than in the world outside.

Charles Darwent (Art critic, Independent on Sunday)

Wainwright and Wynne pick their way across a minefield of colossal emotions, hallucinatory experiences and cutting edge medical technology with great tenderness and delicacy.

Clive Bell (The Wire Magazine)

Through all the differences and similarities of sound and vision, seeing and hearing, looking and listening, a rapprochement emerges in the collaboration. The insistent stillness of a photograph hovers in and out of the temporal movement of spoken language, but both add a powerful sense of human presence and individuality to each other.

Outputs

Primary among these are a 24-channel sound/photography installation in which the photographs are the actual source of the sound, and a published book of essays and interviews containing a DVD.

Other outputs include a surround sound video (ITU, shown in UK, Ireland, Germany, Canada), an award-winning half-hour composed documentary (Hearts, Lungs and Minds, for BBC Radio 3), a multi-channel video/sound installation (Flow, at the Old Operating Theatre in London), and an 8-channel sound work (Part and Parcel, Kettles Yard and the Whitworth Art Gallery).